Discussing the relationship between the dramatic monologue and poetry, Bob Hicok interrogates our assumptions about what constitutes “honesty” in narrative poetry, versus the simultaneous permission and assumption of “assumed identity” in dramatic monologue. “…it's hard not to think of all poems as dramatic monologues. By and large, we accept the notion of the self as a fiction, a construction that is not reliable, that shifts and which the individual, the self, offers with motives that vary. With this in mind, the dramatic monologue strikes me as honest about how much of this stuff is made up, how much we write what we want to write, how fundamentally we're constructing identities in our poems.” He discusses the poem as dramatic monologue as a forum for constructing identity, for filling the voids in our stories, for using language, as it is words and not the thing described itself as an inherent construction, explaining, “That may be the strongest impulse behind imagination: to construct the willed, the wanted world.”

If you're interested in discussing the use of “persona poems” and what constitutes an assumed character or identity in poetry and/or playwriting in your classroom, see the article in our Digital Resource Center titled "Other Bodies to Wear, Other Lives to Use: Bob Hicok on the Dramatic Monologue," by Daniel Godston, for Teachers & Writers Magazine.